It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

A new report from Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme suggests that the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within twenty years. The 90 authors of the rigorously peer-reviewed AMAP report state, “Extrapolations of recent observed data suggest a largely ice-free summer ocean by the late 2030s, which is earlier than projected by most climate models.”

The Arctic is undergoing an astonishingly rapid transition as climate change overwhelms the region. New research sheds light on the latest example of the changes afoot, showing that parts of the Arctic Ocean are becoming more like the Atlantic. Warm waters are streaming into the ocean north of Scandinavia and Russia, altering ocean productivity and chemistry. That’s making sea ice recede and kickstarting a feedback loop that could make summer ice a thing of the past.

A new study offers an extreme solution to shrinking Arctic ice sheets -- if we covered ice in tiny wind-powered pumps, say researchers from Arizona State University, we could potentially pump seawater onto the surface of the ice during the winter. As the water freezes and thickens, it could help the ice survive the next summer.

The Arctic is so warm and has been this warm for so long that scientists are struggling to explain it and are in disbelief. The climate of the Arctic is known to oscillate wildly, but scientists say this warmth is so extreme that humans surely have their hands in it and may well be changing how it operates.

In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system “feedback” of warming soil, especially in the Arctic, that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

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As a result, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Specifically, scientists are observing retreating sea ice, melting glaciers, and shrinking snow and permafrost areas.6 The summer ice cap is estimated to be only half the size it was fifty years ago.7 Sea-ice extent in the Arctic has decreased steadily since the 1950s and in September 2007 reached a record low that was 39 percent below the 1979–2000 mean. September 2008 experienced the second-lowest Arctic ice extent on record, at 34 percent below the 1970–2000 mean. In September 2009, when the Arctic reached its minimum ice extent for the year, it was recorded at the third-lowest extent since 1979 satellite measurements began, further demonstrating the declining trend in summer sea ice over the past thirty years (see the figure).8

Although estimates for when the Arctic will experience ice-free conditions in the summer range from 2013 to 2060, the consensus of most models and researchers is that the Arctic will experience ice-free conditions for a portion of the summer by 2030.9 It is important to point out that no research or model simulations indicate that winter sea-ice cover of the Arctic Ocean will disappear during this century. This reinforces the point that the Arctic will still be a very challenging environment in which to operate.

The ice was never supposed to melt this quickly. Although climate scientists have known for some time that global warming was shrinking the percentage of the Arctic Ocean that was frozen over, few predicted so fast a thaw. In 2007, the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that Arctic summers would become ice free beginning in 2070. Yet more recent satellite observations have moved that date to somewhere around 2035, and even more sophisticated simulations in 2012 moved the date up to 2020. Sure enough, by the end of last summer, the portion of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice had been reduced to its smallest size since record keeping began in 1979, shrinking by 350,000 square miles (an area equal to the size of Venezuela) since the previous summer. All told, in just the past three decades, Arctic sea ice has lost half its area and three quarters of its volume.

Imperative impetus for this change in the US ocean policy comes from the ongoing climate change in the Arctic region and its potential implications for the US. Indeed, receding ice in the Arctic provides new opportunities to the US to secure its energy security and to gain economically by extracting hitherto inaccessible offshore Arctic resources and utilizing navigable Northwest Arctic Passage for commercial shipping. However, its legal status as a non-Party to the LOS Convention has kept the US ―hobbled on the Arctic‘s geopolitical sidelines‖ and acts as a stumbling block in its active participation in important international policymaking bodies- CLCS and ISBA. The US has no say in the CLCS commission with the authority to validate its national claims for extended continental shelf, which may adverserly affect the US Arctic interests. Further, non-participation in the ISBA authority may also marginalise the US interests in the deep seabed mining in the Area, beyond national jurisdiction. All these factors have point out the need for a change in the US ocean policy in recent time. These imperatives emphasize on the need to accede to the LOS Convention to advance US economic and strategic interests in the contemporary world.

The United States has basic and enduring national interests in the oceans. These diverse interests—security, economic, scientific, dispute settlement, environmental, and leadership—are best protected through a comprehensive, widely accepted international agreement that governs the varying (and sometimes competing) uses of the sea. Although the United States has lived outside the Convention for 30 years, climate change in the Arctic provides the current Administration with a new and urgent incentive to re-engage the Senate and urge that body to provide its advice and consent to U.S. accession to the treaty at the earliest opportunity. As a nation with both coastal and maritime interests, the United States would benefit immensely from becoming a party to UNCLOS—accession will restore U.S. oceans leadership, protect U.S. ocean interests and enhance U.S. foreign policy objectives, not only in the Arctic, but globally.

The Arctic has always experienced cooling and warming, but the current melt defies any historical comparison. It is dramatic, abrupt, and directly correlated with industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. In Alaska and western Canada, average winter temperatures have increased by as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit in the past 60 years. The results of global warming in the Arctic are far more dramatic than elsewhere due to the sharper angle at which the sun's rays strike the polar region during summer and because the retreating sea ice is turning into open water, which absorbs far more solar radiation. This dynamic is creating a vicious melting cycle known as the ice-albedo feedback loop.

Each new summer breaks the previous year's record. Between 2004 and 2005, the Arctic lost 14 percent of its perennial ice -- the dense, thick ice that is the main obstacle to shipping. In the last 23 years, 41 percent of this hard, multiyear ice has vanished. The decomposition of this ice means that the Arctic will become like the Baltic Sea, covered by only a thin layer of seasonal ice in the winter and therefore fully navigable year-round. A few years ago, leading supercomputer climate models predicted that there would be an ice-free Arctic during the summer by the end of the century. But given the current pace of retreat, trans-Arctic voyages could conceivably be possible within the next five to ten years. The most advanced models presented at the 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union anticipated an ice-free Arctic in the summer as early as 2013.

Ironically, the great melt is likely to yield more of the very commodities that precipitated it: fossil fuels. As oil prices exceed $100 a barrel, geologists are scrambling to determine exactly how much oil and gas lies beneath the melting icecap. More is known about the surface of Mars than about the Arctic Ocean's deep, but early returns indicate that the Arctic could hold the last remaining undiscovered hydrocarbon resources on earth. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits. Some Arctic wildcatters believe this estimate could increase substantially as more is learned about the region's geology. The Arctic Ocean's long, outstretched continental shelf is another indication of the potential for commercially accessible offshore oil and gas resources. And, much to their chagrin, climate-change scientists have recently found material in ice-core samples suggesting that the Arctic once hosted all kinds of organic material that, after cooking under intense seabed pressure for millennia, would likely produce vast storehouses of fossil fuels.

Global warming is most dramatic in the Arctic. n10 In Alaska and western Canada, average winter temperatures have increased by as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit in the past 60 years.n11 Scientists agree that atmospheric warming will continue for years to come, and that this warming will significantly affect ice coverage in the Arctic. Many experts believe the particularly sharp increase in warming and melting throughout the last few decades can be attributed to both human and natural causes.n12 Because ice and snow are white, they have what is known as a "high albedo" and reflect most solar energy.n13 Albedo is a measure of how strongly an object reflects light from sources such as the sun. Water is darker and thus has a "low albedo" that absorbs most solar radiation. This creates a condition known as a "positive feedback loop" and, as a consequence, the Arctic region essentially amplifies any sort of warming trend.n14 The ocean exposed by melting ice soaks up more heat, which melts more ice and exposes more sea.n15 In the most extreme scenario, the positive feedback loop could cause extreme deterioration of Arctic sea ice, leaving the Arctic Ocean more like the Baltic Sea, covered by only a thin layer of seasonal ice in the winter.n16 At the current pace of retreat, transArctic voyages could be possible within the next five to ten years, but it remains extremely difficult to make an accurate prediction.n17